by Mike Gayle
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ she said. ‘It’s Tony Blair, he’s in the garden!’
I was tempted to raise an indifferent eyebrow and look in the opposite direction just to let my mum know that I had finally beaten her at her own game, but the truth was I was just as excited as she was. Looking through the large window at the back of the room into what was to all intents and purposes Downing Street’s back garden, I saw a jacketless Tony Blair on the patio of the adjacent building gazing into the mid-distance as though he was taking a moment’s break from a long afternoon of meetings.
Once the event was all over and we were collecting our coats and preparing to make our way outside, I took out my camera and asked Mum if she fancied having her photograph taken in front of one of the most famous front doors in the world.
‘Oh, Michael!’ she said, as though I wasn’t being serious.
‘No really, you should do it.’
I practically had to lift her up and place her bodily in front of the door. My mum, a woman who arrived in this country with only a single suitcase and eleven pounds to her name, was standing outside the front door of the Prime Minister of England. This constituted the best tick on my To-Do List so far and seemed like the perfect end to a perfect week.
Chapter 12: ‘Tidy home so that when people visit you no longer have to wear the shroud of shame.’
There was one item on my To-Do List that I would bet good money would be a universal entry on any To-Do List the world over: ‘Tidy home so that when people visit you no longer have to wear a shroud of shame.’ The only exceptions being those hallowed few who have a cleaner, live with their parents or have too much time on their hands. As I had a small baby, a three-year-old daughter and a wife who insisted on leaving half-drunk cups of tea around the house as though she was a tom cat marking his territory, this latter group was never going to include me.
Like most normal members of society, Claire and I did the once-a-week cursory clean so that Social Services didn’t take our children away, but the kind of cleaning that would merit this week’s tick wasn’t the superficial calming down of chaos conducted in the few hours while the baby was asleep and our first-born was at pre-school. No, this was going to involve the hiring of skips, the moving of furniture, the implementation of Oprah-endorsed organisational systems, the use of industrial-strength cleaning products and the wearing of the kind of special suits and breathing apparatus normally reserved for council workmen clearing up the homes of deceased ‘cat ladies’.
With the children out of the house (Maisie was at my mum’s and Lydia was at nursery) and a whole week set aside to earn these cleaning-related ticks, Claire and I decided to focus our attention for the first day of the five-stage process forthwith affectionately referred to as ‘Operation Hose-down’ to general household cleaning. Anything that hadn’t had a good scrub, wipe, polish or scrape in the last year was going to get our fullest attention.
‘Where do we start?’ I said to Claire as we began unloading from the car the best part of fifty pounds’ worth of Sainsbury’s finest cleaning products. ‘Down in the cellar, up in the loft or somewhere in between?’
‘The kitchen,’ said Claire a desperately shameful expression on her face. ‘It’s got to be the kitchen.’
Just as Dorian Gray had the picture in his attic, Claire and I (an outwardly respectable middle-class professional couple) had more than a few dirty secrets of our own most of which, as we pulled our five-burner Smeg cooker away from the wall and peered down at the tiled floor below, were currently staring right at us.
‘What’s that?’ I pointed at a small dark-brown mass on the floor.
Claire swallowed. ‘I think it’s a Swedish meatball.’
‘How long has it been down there?’
‘When was it that we had Helena and Dan over to stay?’
I racked my brains for a few moments. ‘Last February.’
‘Oh,’ said Claire despondently. ‘So that’ll be about a year then.’
‘And what about those?’ I pointed to a group of golden-brown discs.
‘They’re homemade biscuits. I was baking some a few months ago for Lydia’s pre-school and they fell off the tray as I was checking them. Anyway,’ she added indignantly, ‘enough about my misdemeanours, what’s that about?’
I followed her finger to two shrivelled grey lumps.
‘That was me,’ I admit, ‘and I’m pretty sure they used to be chips. They were on a plate. I lost control. I kept telling myself I’d—’
‘And the other thing?’
‘You mean the fork?’
‘No, not that, the other thing.’
‘The salt grinder?’
She shook her head. ‘I mean the other thing.’
‘Oh, that’s an organic pork sausage.’
Claire hung her head in dismay.
‘How long?’
‘When did we get the cooker?’
‘Three years ago.’
‘That will be it then.’
There was a silence.
‘We’re pretty disgusting, aren’t we?’ said Claire, sadly.
‘Yeah.’ I put my arm around her and kissed her on the cheek. ‘That’s why we are made for each other. We appear to disgust each other in equal measure.’
Clearing the space behind the cooker of its rotting remains, kitchen equipment and cutlery wasn’t the last grisly deed for the day. We moved the fridge to reveal lost grapes, a tangerine and an inordinate amount of dust and general debris. Venturing outside I removed the plastic drain cover that’s supposed to keep leaves out but actually does the reverse and attracts them: I shoved my arms inside the stagnant water and fished out half a bucketful of rotting leaves and organic matter decaying slowly in the drain. As Claire remained in the kitchen scrubbing floors, wiping down walls and cooker hoods, I headed up to the bathroom to tackle the U-bend under the sink. For weeks now water had been going down the plughole at a much slower rate than usual and when I dismantled the U-bend I could see why. It was caked in toothpaste and general yuck, some of which flicked up into my open mouth and landed on my tongue, whereupon I’m not ashamed to say that I screamed like a girl, frantically scoured my tongue with a hand towel, rinsed it out about a million times with mouthwash, scoured again with a fresh hand towel and then went and lay down in a darkened room until I felt calmer.
The following day we failed to finish off the remaining cleaning and tidying chores and three days later (we had utterly misjudged how long it was all going to take) we finally finished and were free to tackle the next big job: throwing stuff out and reorganising the stuff that we were going to keep.
In preparation Claire suggested I consult a book that she had borrowed from Alexa but never actually read called Organising From The Inside Out by a professional organiser and de-clutter person called Julie Morgenstern who used to be a contributor to Oprah magazine (hence Alexa’s endorsement). While it probably would have been a good idea to read the book, it wasn’t on my To-Do List, so I couldn’t do anything other than skim the blurb on the back. According to this there were three basic steps to being organised:
1. Analyse
2. Strategise
3. Attack
This was good stuff. We’d do it!
The analysis element was dealt with by Claire: ‘I hate this house and everything in it.’
The strategy part came later: ‘You start in the basement and I’ll take the bedrooms because I don’t want you buzzing round me while I’m listening to the afternoon play.’
Then we attacked.
My attacking wasn’t what you might call focused. Assigned to the basement I soon grew bored and moved to: the living room where I partially alphabetised my CDs; the car where I cleaned out the boot; the bit at the top of the cellar where I cleared out all the coats and then (having panicked at the thought of Claire finding out how many jobs I had started and failed to finish) I crept upstairs to discover that the space that I had once known and loved as ‘our bedroom’ had bec
ome a breeding ground for very large, very full bin bags.
‘What’s all this then?’ I sounded inexplicably like a 1950s’ policeman. ‘Are we having a jumble sale?’
‘I have had enough.’ Claire spoke through gritted teeth. ‘This time, this lot is going for good.’
Claire and I had been in this position before, namely in the Great Bin Bag Wars of 1996 (when we got married); and again in 2000 (when we moved to our present house); and once again in 2003 (when the builders who had been occupying our home while they renovated it for eight months finally left) and it always went the same way. Under the guise of thinning out our wardrobes Claire would attempt to take every single item of clothing we owned (bar the ones we were wearing) to Oxfam. Her bizarre logic was always the same: ‘But you don’t wear any of this stuff!’ And I would always reply: ‘And I won’t be able to if you’re always giving it all away!’ or the more sardonic, ‘Who are you? The Clothes Wearing Enforcement Agency?’ or my favourite: ‘I’m saving them for the right occasion!’ (This always made us laugh because I really would hate any occasion to arise when the only suitable outfit would be a purple lumberjack shirt teamed with an orange waistcoat.) This wouldn’t have been so bad had it just been my clothes but I had to worry about hers too. I admit that some of my concern was the pain it caused me that she was giving away a top from Reiss that she had only worn twice even though it had cost over sixty quid; but I also had a sentimental attachment to some of her wardrobe. The checked shirt that she’d worn on our first date, the Bloc Party band T-shirt that I’d bought her two years ago and the Chinese silk pyjamas that she had wanted for so long that I was convinced I would earn enough good husband brownie points to be able to bank the lot and live off the interest. These were all clothes that I had loved and she was intent on binning them!
‘But I don’t wear them,’ she predictably complained.
‘And you never will if you keep giving them away!’ I was equally predictable.
‘Why don’t you change the record! You say that whenever I try to thin out our wardrobes.’
‘That’s because you always misinterpret the words “thin out” to mean throw away everything we’ve ever owned,’ I reasoned. ‘I’ll tell you what, why don’t we just cut out the middleman and whenever we go shopping take the new clothes straight to Oxfam? It’ll save a fortune in bin bags!’
‘Fine, if you’re so brilliant at sorting things out you can do this lot on your own!’ snapped Claire as she threw the roll of bin bags in the direction of my head and stormed out.
Thankfully, as with the Great Bin Bag Wars of 1996, 2000 and 2003, this year’s battle ended with the same face-saving result: a draw. Once Claire and I had made up following our row (which after ten years of marriage we found ludicrously easy) we went through the bin bags item by item and with a sparing use of veto agreed to give to Oxfam the stuff that I genuinely had no interest in. In return I got to keep some of Claire’s clothes that I had various degrees of emotional or fiscal attachment to. After a week of disposing of ancient meatballs, tasting U-bend gunge and arguing with my wife, as To-Do-List ticks went this had definitely been of the ‘hard won’ variety.
Excerpt from Mike’s To-Do-List Diary (Part 3)
Thursday 1 March
8.55 a.m. The good news: I’ve just set in motion the first part of Item 408: ‘Go and see a doctor about the knee you injured playing football three years ago.’ I have made an appointment for 5.00 p.m. tomorrow! The bad news: my childhood is still riding around in the back of the car.
2.55 p.m. I am in a plane on my way to Glasgow for an event that my publishers are throwing to promote various books to the trade. I had planned to watch the rest of The Wire on my computer as part of Item 813: ‘Finish off the rest of Season One of The Wire’ but as soon as I get on the plane I fall asleep instead. I suspect all this extra activity is beginning to take its toll.
Friday 2 March
19.55 p.m. I am back from Glasgow having managed to watch roughly ten minutes of the second episode of The Wire before falling asleep. Now it is Friday night and the kids are asleep, so Claire and I are letting our hair down and tackling Items 978–983: ‘Drink up all the old duty-free spirits that you’ve bought over the years because you hate to miss a bargain’. In fact, while Claire only drinks wine and I prefer lager, none of our family or friends drinks spirits at all. Despite this we still have:
1 bottle of Peach Schnapps (Innsbruck Airport, Austria)
2 bottles of Dream Island Cocktail mix (Seychelles International Airport)
1 bottle of Mount Gay rum (Grantley Adams International Airport, Barbados)
1 bottle of Ouzo (Larnaca Airport, Cyprus)
1 bottle of Tequila (Mexico City International Airport)
1 bottle of Banana liqueur (Birmingham International Airport)
8.00 p.m. Claire and I have our first drink of the evening: two shots of ouzo each. It tastes just as vile now as it did when we first tried it on holiday in Cyprus five years ago. Age has not mellowed this drink at all. Why we bought it I’ll never know.
8.05 p.m. Claire and I are making cocktails with the Dream Island Cocktail mix and some leftover lemonade. It tastes ace. ‘This is like melted ice cream with a kick,’ says Claire. ‘We should’ve started drinking this a lot earlier.’
8.20 p.m. Three drinks in and we are on the peach schnapps. With lemonade. It tastes so sweet that I fear my teeth falling out and the immediate onset of type two diabetes.
9.33 p.m. Claire has opted out of the evening’s experiment on the grounds that at least one of us should be legally sober should one of the kids wake up. Emboldened by flying solo I am mixing my drinks big time. In front of me is a highball glass filled with ouzo, Dream Island Cocktail mix, Banana liqueur, rum, the last bit of the lemonade and a fistful of ice. I’ve dubbed it the Dirty Duty. It looks slightly radioactive. Claire asks me if I think that Derek and Jessica would ever drink a Dirty Duty. I tell her they would if it came in a fancy glass and cost £16.00 a go.
10.31 p.m. I have had to stop drinking. My stomach is churning like a washing machine on spin cycle. I ask Claire if it might have been something I ate. She just raises her eyebrows and sighs.
Saturday 3 March
2.23 a.m. I am being sick.
2.53 a.m. I am being even more sick.
3.02 a.m. I am being sick again even though there is nothing left to throw up other than my kidneys.
Sunday 4 March
7.00 a.m. Claire is letting me have a lie-in as I still feel a bit fragile after my efforts on Friday night. With so much alcohol left over even after my valiant attempts with the Dirty Duty, I have decided to put this particular tick on pause and move on to something more edifying. Item 345 is: ‘Have a go at those learn-to-speak-Italian CDs’. I’d bought the CDs five years ago when Claire and I were planning a holiday to the Italian Lakes but had never even opened them. Every couple of years Claire would threaten to take them to Oxfam. Wresting them from her grip I would swear that one day I would indeed learn Italian and then she would end up ridere on the other side of her faccia.
7.23 a.m. After spending the best part of twenty minutes turning my office upside down I eventually locate the CDs underneath a pile of old newspapers. I eagerly tear the Cellophane off, look at the CDs and read the labels. Each one lasts seventy minutes. One hundred and forty minutes is quite a long time to spend trying to learn another language. I imagine myself sitting in front of my computer practising Italian. One hundred and forty minutes is definitely too long. Perhaps, given that it’s a Sunday and that I’ve been quite ill, I should try one CD to start with.
Monday 5 March
4.33 p.m. ‘A che ora e servita la colazione?’ says the voice on the CD. ‘Arrh key ohr-ahur eee sehr-vee-taher lah koh-laht-zee-oh-nehay,’ I repeat, putting my heart into making my version of ‘What time is breakfast?’ sound authentically Italian. Sadly, I’m about as close to sounding authentically Italian as Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau is authentically Fr
ench. My irreducible Brummie inflections and terrible grasp of pronunciation are not so much mangling this beautiful language as battering it to death with a sledgehammer and then running it over several times with a 4×4.
Tuesday 6 March
4.48 p.m. Having opted to put learning Italian on hold I’m trying to decide whether to tackle Item 412: ‘Become a blood donor’, or Item 328: ‘Speak to a financial advisor about investing for the future so that you don’t have to spend your dotage in penury’, when I remember that I’m supposed to be at my local GP’s surgery showing them my knee.
5.10 p.m. I am trying to explain to my doctor why I have waited until now to bring a three-year-old injury to the attention of a medical professional. ‘It was always on my To Do List but I could never find the time,’ I explain. He seems unimpressed. ‘By waiting this long you’ve probably made the situation a lot worse.’ He writes a letter of referral to a clinic for some physiotherapy.
Wednesday 7 March
9.55 a.m. I’m looking at the car boot filled with my childhood and wondering how I’m to transport the pram and travel cot in my hands over to my parents’ house so they can look after Maisie for a couple of hours. Claire says I should just bite the bullet and bin all the childhood stuff. I know she is right but I am still conflicted.
Chapter 13: ‘Now you’re well into your thirties start taking your health seriously.’
When people feel pain in their sinuses they think, ‘Oh, I’ve got sinusitis.’ When people get an unexplained spot on their hand they think, ‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’ And when people start coughing and spluttering they think, ‘I’m coming down with a bad cold, I’ll get some Lemsip.’ But when these things happen to me I don’t think like other people. I think like me. Hence sinusitis becomes a potential brain tumour, a spot is the beginning of necrotising fasciitis disease and seasonal coughing and spluttering is down to a local park encounter with a dodgy-looking mallard – before you can say ‘avian bird flu’ I’m Googling the nearest supplier of Tamiflu. This pretty much tells you all you need to know about why Item 772: ‘Make a decision about private health care’, made it on to the To-Do List. But there was a second reason.